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Sunday, February 11, 2018

Am I obligated to try to save former colleague from embarrassment?

Alan, a former colleague of Tim, was searching for a job.
As part of his search effort, Alan was contacting many former colleagues,
including Tim, to let them know he was looking Sometimes Alan was emailing and
sometimes he was connecting through social media websites such as LinkedIn,
where he knew many former colleagues had set up their own pages.

Tim didn't know Alan well, but they had worked together
briefly several years earlier. When he received an alert on LinkedIn that Alan
had sent him a note, he read it and, because he really didn't know of any leads
for the type of positing for which Alan was looking, he figured no response was
necessary.

But curious to know what Alan had been up to since they
had worked together, he decided to take a look at Alan's profile page. Tim was
pleased to see that Alan had had some good success advancing in his career at
several companies.

Tim also noticed, however, that Alan had several glaring
typos on the part of his LinkedIn page that replicated his professional resume.
They were the kind of typos that a spellchecker would not likely flag since the
mistyped word was actually a real word, just not the one Alan intended. In some
cases, the typos were innocuous. In a few others, the mistyped word resulted in
featuring a word that might cause embarrassment if Alan knew what he'd typed.
In all cases, Tim thought, the typos might suggest to a prospective employer
that Alan was sloppy with detail.

"Since I don't have any real leads to offer,"
Tim asks, "should I contact Alan to let him know of the typos?" Tim
writes that he'd had to think that Alan has similar typos in the resume he's
been sending off to prospective employers. "I don't want to embarrass Alan
or to sound like I'm judging him."

Tim has no obligation to let Alan know about the typos on
his LinkedIn page. Nevertheless, letting Alan know about them would be the
right thing to do. If the roles were reversed, Tim, or most anyone else, would
want someone to alert them to such potentially embarrassing errors,
particularly in the midst of a job search.

There's no reason Tim should feel bad that he responds to
Alan not with the information on possible jobs he asked, but with a note
wishing him well and calmly alerting him to the fact that he noticed a few
potentially embarrassing typos on his LinkedIn profile. If Alan doesn't
respond, that's on him. But Alan should acknowledge such a response and thank
Tim or whoever else might point out the errors to him. It's not only in Alan's
best interest to show courtesy when he is in the process of reaching out to
others for help, it's the right thing to do anytime a friend or colleague tries
to help.

Trying to be helpful to a former colleague by pointing
out errors that might derail his job search is not judgmental. It's something
I'd hope anyone, regardless of whether they could land me a plum new position,
would point out to me or anyone of you should we find ourselves in Alan's
position.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Jeffrey is right to note that it would be unnecessary for the friend to tell his friend about the errors, but any right thinking person should feel an obligation to be a good enough "friend" to alert his friend of the errors.

Jeffrey Seglin writes "The Right Thing," a syndicated weekly ethics column distributed by Tribune Media. From 2004 to 2010, the column was distributed by The New York Times Syndicate. From 1998 to 2004, he wrote a monthly ethics column of the same name for The Sunday New York Times business section.

He is a senior lecturer of public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He was an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston where he taught writing and ethics from 1999 until 2011.